Music

The closest thing to a countercultural experience that you’re likely to come across in Ladbroke Grove these days is to rent Nic Roeg’s ‘Performance’ from the local video shop. But, as anyone who’s seen that film will tell you, the place was once a haven for kids seeking free love, drugs, rock ’n’ roll and all manner of thrill-inducing goodness. And just to prove that any of this actually took place (because it has pretty much been wiped from the history books following an influx of millionaires), one-time Grove scenester Nigel Cross has compiled a collection of psychedelia and odd rock from the time, ‘Cries From The Midnight Circus: The Ladbroke Grove Scene 1967-1978’.
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It’s a story that Cross wanted to tell in the wake of anti-hippy sentiments, not least, he reckons, from Primal Scream, who – although indebted to late ’60s music – hate the attendant culture and, in the words of one song, suggest we ‘Kill All Hippies’. Says Cross: ‘I had problems with aspects of hippy culture too, but there were some good things to come out of it. And in the US they’ve got all these respected, bohemian centres and I believe that we had an equivalent scene here in Ladbroke Grove.’

Mick Farren

What Cross is getting at are the striking similarities between the Kaftan-clad Grove of the late ’60s and its brother in daisy chains, San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury. In what’s a timely coincidence – not least because it’s 40 years since the Summer Of Love – this month sees the release of another psych-collecting set, ‘Love Is The Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970’. Just like that ace ’Cisco CD, ‘Cries From The Midnight…’ dusts down all the different, rock-mangling sounds – from garage to proto-prog and, er, ‘Narnia’-rock – that came out of a scene that was birthed (and killed) in the same way as Haight-Ashbury.

With the area blacklisted after 1958’s race riots and full of crumbling Victorian villas, Ladbroke Grove wasn’t made up of the chintzy streets we know today. Mick Farren, legendary Grover, writer and member of The Deviants and Pink Fairies, both of whom appear on ‘Cries From The Midnight…’, paints a gritty, parent-freaking place.

‘I went to St Martins and there was nowhere to live east, so we went west,’ he says. ‘Queensway was full of Swedish students, so next was Ladbroke Grove. It was a community of hustlers, rude boys and ne’er-do-wells, both black and white, and we all fitted together rather well in our general dislike of authority.’

Another regular in the area was Dave Brock, chief space cadet of local legends Hawkwind. He remembers the area being overrun by – ahem! – ‘ladies of the night’, and, as a sometime-electrician, he used to rewire their houses. It was pretty grim until the art students started dropping acid, he says. Then the Grove became a friendly, if warped, village; one in which you could stake a week’s rent on bumping into Lemmy (also in Hawkwind at the time) or fantasy writer Michael Moorcock.

'Cries From The Midnight Circus: Ladbroke Grove 1967-78'

It seems clichéd now, but the residents brightened up the area with psychedelic front doors; ‘head shops’ opened on Portobello Road; record stalls turned people onto Captain Beefheart; and bands started hanging out in the Mountain Grill Café (immortalised on Hawkwind’s ‘Hall Of The Mountain Grill’ album) and Finch’s pub. For a venue, they played under the Westway and All Saints Hall, who put on Merry Pranksters-style light shows and gigs by Pink Floyd and Hawkwind. Farren and Brock both recall some pretty out-of-control happenings.

‘I don’t know about memorable,’ laughs Brock. ‘People were dropping acid! We did play a gig at Porchester Hall. They had these chandeliers and people started nicking them because they were tripping.’

‘We’d cut a deal with somebody who had a flat that we could run extension leads into the night from,’ says Farren. ‘We’d play for half an hour before the police turned up. I remember an inspector standing behind our drummer, Russell Hunter, and he said, “Next person to make a noise, you’re all nicked.” We looked at Russell and knew he wouldn’t be able to help himself. He hit the bass drum and we were all carted off. It was anarchy.’

It’s the pre-smack magic of Ladbroke Grove which ‘Cries From Midnight…’ attempts to capture. It does it well, too, veering from The Pretty Things’ freakbeat to The Deviants’ MC5-like garage (check out Farren’s afro!) and the ‘Narnia’ bands, who believed in unicorns, to Motörhead, providing a lineage from ’60s mod to early punk.

Like Haight-Ashbury, though, this wasn’t just an acid-gobbling freak scene. Community projects, like the London Free School, set up crèches and arranged the first carnival. Caroline Coon started up Release to provide legal advice for anybody mistreated by the law, while underground papers International Times and Friends tried to stop people taking bad acid. This radicalism left a legacy too in the social housing you’ll find on Freston Road. Squatters created the Independent State Of Frestonia in 1977 when threatened with eviction by the evil GLC. The residents wanted cheap housing and forced the government to build some. Proactive hippies? Who would’ve thunk it?

Of course, it won’t come as a surprise to hear that the scene came crashing down in a storm of drugs, paranoia and death, just like in San Francisco. Hendrix even died on Clarendon Road. But even though the Grove scene fizzled out in the same way every rock movement does it still left an imprint. The tougher sounds on ‘Cries From The Midnight…’ point towards punk and Joe Strummer was a local squatter. That all seems like a zillion years ago now, especially when the place has been gentrified to within an inch of its life and those last remnants of counter-culture, magic mushroom stalls, have gone from Portobello Market. Mick Jagger’s ’shroom-munching character in ‘Performance’ wouldn’t be impressed.

But how accurate a depiction was that? ‘Well,’ sniggers Farren. ‘It was if you happened to be a rock star living in a huge mansion. But the character he played would’ve been happier in Sloane Square with the aristocratic flower-power lot. As far as drugs, sex and rock ’n’ roll went, there was a rivalry between Chelsea and us lot. And we had them pretty scared.’

How about that for peace and love?

‘Cries From The Midnight Circus: Ladbroke Grove 1967-78’ and ‘Love Is the Song We Sing: San Francisco Nuggets 1965-1970’ are out now